Here’s something to celebrate: The NMPF Export and Trade (NEXT) program is one year old, and already it’s a critical part of dairy’s export success.
NEXT is a voluntary, U.S. dairy product sales overseas and seeks a better alignment of supply and demand for milk and milk products at home. Member cooperatives provide the funding for NEXT by contributing two cents per hundredweight of milk marketed.
That may sound similar to the former Cooperatives Working Together program, but NEXT improves on it in multiple ways. After years of discussions with our members about how to strengthen CWT’s approach — revamp what CWT did, from eligible products to program structure — NEXT is more targeted, more flexible and more transparent, with clear benefits that’s showing through positive effects for its members.
Through NEXT’s first year, which ended at the beginning of July, NEXT committed export assistance on more than 315 million pounds of dairy products destined for international markets. That’s a 73% greater volume than in 2024, the last year of the CWT program, at a cost to its members that’s half of the CWT assessment.
Here are some numbers showing what NEXT is achieving:
- In its inaugural year, NEXT supported exports of the equivalent of 74 million pounds of butter in the form of butter, anhydrous milkfat and whole milk powder. Add the milkfat exported in the form of cheese, and that figure soars to 126 million pounds of butter equivalent. For comparison, if you changed the U.S. butter standard from 80% to 82%, that would increase U.S. butter use by around 50 million pounds.
- Beyond helping build overseas markets for U.S. milkfat, NEXT is keeping U.S. cheese competitive in international markets, supporting exports of more than 127 million pounds of cheese.
- NEXT is also supporting more markets than CWT did. NEXT supported exports to 37 countries over the past 12 months, more than one-third more than CWT would in a typical year.
- NEXT’s new target market pilots, which provide additional support in key growth markets or markets where U.S. product is preferentially disadvantaged compared to competitors, have also borne fruit. For instance, the United States has once again overtaken New Zealand as the largest butter supplier to Mexico, with NEXT supported volume accounting for over half of the total increase in U.S. sales.
- Similarly, NEXT’s Skim Milk Powder tariff mitigation program, which helps offset costs created by higher U.S. tariff rates, has helped spur a turnaround in U.S. exports to Indonesia despite U.S. prices sharply diverging from global markets for the past several months. In fact, NEXT commitments were roughly 40% of the U.S. total Nonfat Dry Milk/Skim Milk Powder exports to the country in the past year.
At a fundamental level, NEXT’s export investment has helped grow demand abroad for U.S. dairy and maintain the global competitiveness of participating cooperatives, even when U.S. prices have diverged from global markets.
More work remains to expand U.S. dairy’s presence overseas; NEXT remains just one tool in the toolbox for the U.S. dairy industry to grow export sales abroad. Still, NEXT has become an increasingly critical tool that complements the policy work done to maintain and expand market access abroad as well as the broader promotional efforts of the U.S. Dairy Export Council.
Looking ahead, the program’s future is bright. It’s always seeking new input, and new members — we’re happy to work with any member co-op interested in learning more. We’re only one year in, and NEXT clearly is helping build a brighter future for dairy. We’re thrilled by the opportunity to lead.
Gregg Doud
President & CEO, NMPF
